Maybe you’ve played a game with a child. If you have, then you’ll know that oftentimes, kids will make up make up the rules to new games. You’ll also know that when the child starts to lose, he will likely change the rules. He’ll make exceptions and complicate the rules to the point that no one, even himself can follow them. After all, if you can’t understand the rules, but the child can give you the impression that he can, he’ll always win the game.
On an unrelated note:
The Bible very clearly teaches us some things about God.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
(Deuteronomy 6:4, ESV)
For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.
(Colossians 1:16, ESV)
these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.
(1 Corinthians 2:10-11, ESV)
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.
(John 1:1-3, ESV)
According to these verses, among others, the Spirit is God, Jesus is God, and the Father is God. We are also told that God is one. The Trinity doesn’t consist of three thirds of God. The Trinity is One, and there are three persons of the Trinity.
The rules are simple. God isn’t made up of parts. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit aren’t each 33% of the Trinity. There you go. Now you can skip that Theology 101 class. That’s the Biblical doctrine of divine simplicity.
Now some silly neighbor kids come along and don’t like those rules so they decide to add their own. They heard from a neighbor that read a book by a dead guy that God is purus actus. Or maybe that God eternally spirates, or that God’s essence is equal to his attributes and actions. So they try to convince you that if you don’t understand these things, you don’t really understand the game. If you get caught up in their rules, you’ll lose. Also, you’ll either end up a Catholic or a Pantheist. Or both.
But where are they getting these things? Certainly not directly from Scripture. That doesn’t make the rules bad necessarily (though we should be at least extremely skeptical). Exploring ideas is all well and good, but when someone tries to tell you that if you don’t incorporate their made up rules in your real-life game, you’re actually playing the game wrong, then they’re the ones misunderstanding the game. Treating the external rules as if they’re Gospel truth is the problem.
Giving in to overcomplication is a problem too. The Biblical doctrine of divine simplicity is just that. Simple. It’s easy to understand. A child could understand it. It’s even right there in the Bible.
Imagine you’re teaching your child to hit a ball with a stick. You need a rock and a stick. Then a scholar comes along, slaps the rock out of your hand and jerks the stick away from your child, shouting “This isn’t true baseball! You’re not allowed to hit that rock unless it’s a sphere 2.86 to 2.94 inches in diameter, and weighing 5 to 5.25 ounces. Not to mention the material, weight, and shape of the stick! This is simply an outrage!”
If you had sense, you’d knock the guy out and take your kid to a more reasonable park.
Here’s a real life example of this kind of overcomplication:
Thomas Aquinas took divine simplicity a lot farther. Like, a lot. He said that not only are the three persons of the Trinity one, but also that everything about God is God. God’s very attributes equal himself. So God’s anger, love, mercy, justice, all individually equals God. Thomas Aquinas also believed that God was so perfect that he couldn’t actually do anything. Or maybe he was always doing everything. Or maybe he is both doing and not doing at the same time. And God is immutable, so he can never do anything other than what he’s doing. So when God is angry and rebukes his people, he is just God doing absolutely nothing. And everything. Because God’s anger is God. And when we see God being angry, we can’t actually call that an attribute or an emotion of God, because that would imply that he has parts or that he changes in some way. So we just have to recognize that God’s anger is merely something we perceive. Not something that God actually does.
Does that make sense? No? Cool. Because it doesn’t.
According to a handful of pretentious modern scholars, if you don’t understand and accept all that, you don’t actually know the true God.
Thomas Aquinas is the posterchild of this approach to theology. He seems to be aware of the verse, “The Lord was exceeding angry with His people” (Psalm 105:40) in Question 3 Article 2 about Divine Simplicity. But then he goes on to say “Thus, because to punish is properly the act of an angry man, God’s punishment is metaphorically spoken of as His anger.
Thomas Aquinas, trying to maintain the doctrines that he’s built up so far in his book that he wrote cloistered up in a monastery while the Catholic Church hunted pre-reformers like Peter Waldo, has to resort to twisting the very Word of God to maintain his views. He doesn’t simply say, “God is mysterious and we can’t completely understand Him, though I know His Word is True.”
Instead, he says “Nah, this can’t actually mean what it says. Imma correct God here.”
So, according to the Greatest Theologian of all Time™ God wasn’t really angry. We just perceive him as angry. Because divine simplicity.
But what does God say in his Word? He says that he was “exceeding angry with His people.” Who are we going to believe? God? Or Aquinas? Because we can’t believe both.
When we say the Bible is wrong, the Bible ceases to be the Word of God to us. In which case we should throw it out to make room for out copy of the Summa Theologica.
Further Reading
Here’s a great article about some major issues with the Theology of Thomas Aquinas:
https://dougwils.com/the-church/s16-theology/11-reasons-why-we-should-not-consider-thomism-to-be-the-theological-equivalent-of-the-butterflys-boots.html
Book: The Failure of Natural Theology: A Critical Appraisal of the Philosophical Theology of Thomas Aquinas — Solid book that goes into great detail with the theology of Thomas Aquinas, the failure of the Thomistic approach to Natural Theology, and describes the recent phenomenon of Thomism seeping into reformed circles.
Book: Simply Trinity — I certainly don’t recommend buying it, but if you choose to read it for research purposes, notice how it argues that the Bible can be used to support a wide variety of heretical conclusions, therefore we can’t rely on the Bible. We should instead rely on the labyrinthine writings of uninspired dead guys to understand what God really wants us to know. Simply Trinity embarrassingly gives better Biblical arguments for Arianism than the author’s Greek philosophy-muddled view of the Trinity.
